Sustainable Coffee Supply Chains: How Technology is Helping Kenyan Cooperatives Navigate the EU Deforestation Regulation
Cooperative leaders like Nelson Kimani have a clear job: improving the incomes and livelihoods of their member farmers. So when the chairman of the New Murarandia Farmers’ Cooperative Society in Murang’a County, Kenya, heard about the new European deforestation regulations, he wondered how they would impact the cooperative and its 4,000 members. Most of the members have tiny coffee plots–around 0.10 hectares–and any changes that make it more difficult to sell their coffee could seriously impact these farmers’ incomes.
How the EUDR Impacts Coffee Farmers
Farmers and farmer organizations around the world have been asking similar questions. We have found that cooperative leaders have limited familiarity with the new regulation, and many do not know what it means for their organizations and the farmers who depend on them.
The European Union Deforestation Regulation, commonly called EUDR, is a new law that aims to prevent products associated with deforestation and forest degradation from entering the European market.
EUDR requires companies to ensure that products containing cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy, and timber are sourced from land that hasn’t been deforested after 2020. Following a recent decision by the European Union, the regulation will be enforced starting in December 2025.
For Kenyan coffee cooperatives, EUDR provides an opportunity to demonstrate that their coffee is deforestation-free, giving customers confidence that their coffee meets this important standard.
However, the regulation requires that all coffee sold in Europe be identified to a set of farm plots and that each plot be shown not to sit on recently deforested land. This means that farmer organizations like the New Murarandia Farmers’ Cooperative Society will need to collect data at an unprecedented scale. Without this data, the cooperative will not be able to sell its crop to coffee roasters and retailers in Europe, reducing farmers’ incomes and livelihoods.
A Technological Solution for EUDR Compliance
One solution for EUDR compliance is to develop and promote tools that enable farmer cooperatives and buyers to gather and share essential farm data.
For example, TerraTrac, an Android application developed by TechnoServe Labs, is available free of charge on the Google Play store. To test how this tool could be used to meet EUDR requirements, the TechnoServe Kenya team–through the Nespresso AAA Sustainable Quality Program–conducted a pilot to determine the most effective way to support coffee cooperatives in compliance.
The pilot enabled us to give feedback to TerraTrac’s developers and determine the most efficient data collection process. We also established the best methods for collecting accurate coordinates and field-data collection strategies, such as having local guides help map movement from one farm to the next efficiently.
The program team has supported 19 cooperative societies–which operate 48 washing stations where coffee is purchased and processed–to use the TerraTrac app to collect GPS data. The support included training on:
- How to use the TerraTrac app and achieve a high level of accuracy using the tool
- Backstopping to flag coordinates that could be erroneous
- Downloading, backing up, and sharing the data
- Calculating the cost of data collection activities and how best to implement the process to be cost-effective.
A Cost-Effective Approach to Deforestation-Free Supply Chains
The calculations made by cooperatives found TerraTrac to be an affordable solution. For most cooperatives, the cost of data collection with the open-source, free-to-use app is about $0.30 per farmer. The expenses include the wages paid to data collectors and a local guide, transport costs, and internet data costs for use with the smartphone while collecting the data.
This stands in contrast to many of the other solutions on the market. Cooperatives that purchase software have to pay approximately $1,200 in addition to the data-collection expenses in the field. For organizations with often limited resources, this presents an obstacle to data collection and EUDR compliance.
The New Murarandia Farmers’ Cooperative Society is one of the cooperatives to adopt TerraTrac.
“We appreciate the way the AAA Sustainable Quality program supported us by showing us a free-to-use GPS data-collection tool, training us on its use, and helping us plan and execute our data collection,” said Nelson. “Now we have a set of data that marks all farms that supply coffee to the cooperative coffee washing station.” This means that the cooperative members should be able to benefit from continued access to high-quality European markets for their products.
The pilot also identified some key considerations for helping cooperatives adopt solutions like TerraTrac, including:
- The need for clear communication to the farmers about the purpose and the use of the data as it is collected. This also provides an opportunity to underscore how cutting down forests could affect their coffee business.
- The importance of backing up the data as collection progresses to prevent information from being lost or corrupted
- The tool should be customized to the local context to make the data collection simple and accurate.
Scaling EUDR Solutions through Collaboration
The effort to customize tools for data collection and traceability received a major boost last month. TechnoServe announced a collaboration with the AgStack Foundation, an open-source project by the Linux Foundation, which will allow software developers and engineers to use the TerraTrac code to develop new applications for traceability and EUDR compliance.
With new tools and innovations, leaders like Nelson will be able to ensure that farmers see real-world benefits from EUDR.
